Over recent years, the Internet has evolved from a convenient additional means of communications to an essential communication tool in the business, technical and educational fields. In this regard, a growing segment of the Internet relates to Internet telephony which provides a number of advantages over conventional circuit-switched network controlled by a separate signaling network. For one thing, parties are allowed to more easily select and use encoding and other data compression techniques that are most appropriate for their quality needs. Parties may, for example, decide that for international calls, they would trade lower cost for full toll quality, while a reporter calling in her story to a radio station may go for full FM quality with little regard for price. Even without quality degradation, 5.3 kb/s (G.723.1) to 8 kb/s (G.729) are sufficient to support close to toll quality as opposed to 64 kb/s for conventional landline telephone networks. This flexibility also has the advantage that during severe network overload, e.g., after a natural catastrophe, telephone customers can still communicate at about 3 kb/s, thus increasing network capacity twenty-fold.
While it is logical to extend telephony services to existing data networks, such as the Internet, because of the intelligence required in the end systems, cost poses a major disadvantage. Previously, it has been difficult to build packet voice “telephones” requiring no external power that operate over low-grade twisted pair wires several miles long at the cost of a basic analog phone.
In addition, the majority of known Internet telephony products are designed to operate in accordance with the H.323 signaling and control protocol. The H.323 protocol is a complex protocol which is difficult to use and implement. As a result of this complexity, different implementations of H.323 devices may be adversely affected by compatibility issues. In addition, devices operating under the H.323 protocol cannot communicate directly with one another, calls must be processed and routed by a telephony server.
According, there remains a need for a network telephony appliance which is low cost, operates using a simple signaling protocol and offers a vast set of advanced telephony features.